Tag Archives: Corporate Astroturf

At her for-profit National Tea Party Convention speech in Nashville, TN, on Saturday, Feb. 6, 2010, Sarah Palin said the T.P. movement is “a ground-up call to action,” and, for once, she’s right: It was ‘ground up’ in the meat grinder of Fox News, wealthy commodities trader and CNBC personality Rick Santelli, lobbyist and FreedomWorks head Dick Armey, and the legions of anonymous employees of the Corporate Astroturf world. BTW, the former Czarina of Russia East said she was donating her $100K speaking fee to a ’cause,’ without specifying what cause that might be. Could it be her future 2012 presidential campaign, or just to buy up some more of her own books?

Plus: Obama’s Playing Health Care Reform Chess with the Death Party and He’s Winning

It’s About Time: Pretend journalist and right-wing dipthong John Stossel and his gay-porn-star-mustache have joined Fox News, his ideological home for the past twenty years anyway. Actually, the AP article says he’ll have a regular show on the moribund Fox Business Channel which has an audience of about 150 poor wretches employed by owner Rupert Murdoch and pop up on Fox News occasionally. The story-behind-the-story? ABC News couldn’t wait to get rid of this strutting little pimple and they’ve been gently pushing him out the door for the better part of a decade. After years of bellowing the tiresome “Give me a break!” to the point where some of his viewers volunteered to administer one to his neck, Stossel is finally getting his hee, hee — ‘big break’ on Fox. The spoiled Stossel’s lowest and most hilarious moment at ABC came when ‘Mr. Honest Libertarian’ admitted on-air that he had a luxury vacation beach house that had been flattened by a hurricane that he then had the evil government pay to rebuild through just the kind of program for rich idiots like himself that he railed against on a regular basis on ABC’s “20/20.” Hey, he didn’t like stealing the taxpayer’s money, but as long as the program was available, what the hell? And he’d do it again, too, he said, because he really loved that luxury beach house. Never occurred to his hypocritical ass to pay for it out of his own fat wallet. Give me a f*cking break indeed. Have a nice time working for Rupert and Roger Ailes, Johnny maybe you they’ll let you trade quips with Glenn Beck and Orly Taitz about Obama’s birth certificate and do in-depth interviews with ‘morans’ at teabag rallies — you know, real news.

The GOP Sleep Doctor: Why did the GOP pick a potato-headed southern doctor in a bad suit who resembles a Hicksville undertaker to give the Republican response to Obama’s health care speech? Easy, they knew they didn’t have anyone with the firepower to outdo BHO, so they went the other way and dredged up this boring drone named Charles “Lord” Boustany who by some cosmic accident was elected to a Congressional seat from Louisiana. Well, at least the Republicans avoided the embarrassment of another humiliating pratfall by a Bobby “Big Checks!” Jindal, the lame Louisiana governor who is now running around the state taking credit for Obama’s stimulus money that he once indignantly said he would refuse. Most viewers probably ignored Boustany, the same way you’d turn away at a whiff of formaldehyde, but he was actually entertaining, in a demented GOP way the Republican’s puny rant was obviously written before Obama addressed Congress, so Lord B. was getting pissy over things Obama had already clarified in his speech. Not that truth has ever been any hindrance to GOP BS, but seeing it in such stark contrast to what Obama had just said a quarter-hour before was hilarious.